App Store Keyword Field: Counting Rules That Matter

Updated July 12, 2026 · by the Shipzen team

The App Store gives you exactly 100 characters of keywords per locale, and most listings waste a chunk of them on duplicates, plurals, and words Apple tells you not to include. This guide sticks to what Apple actually documents about how search works and how the field is parsed, so every character earns its place.

What App Store search actually indexes

Apple says search results are ranked on text relevance and user behavior. The text side draws on your app name (30 characters), subtitle (30 characters), keyword field (100 characters), and primary category; the behavior side is downloads, ratings, and reviews. That means your total controllable keyword surface per locale is roughly 160 characters across three fields — and the three are indexed together, which is exactly why repeating a word between them buys you nothing.

The counting rules

Separate terms with commas, and skip the space after each comma — Apple's own example is Property,House,Real Estate. A space after every comma in a full field costs several characters of pure padding.
Spaces are fine inside a phrase (Real Estate counts as one term).
Every character counts toward the 100, commas included — audit the raw string, not your keyword list.

What silently wastes characters

Apple's guidance names the waste explicitly. Do not spend characters on:

Words already in your name, subtitle, or category — they are indexed from those fields already.
Plurals of words you already have — "climb" covers "climbs".
Generic terms like "app" or "game", and filler words like "the" or "to".
Special characters such as # or @, unless they are genuinely part of your brand.
Trademarks you don't own, celebrity names, and competitor app names — beyond wasting space, these are grounds for rejection.

The pattern behind all five: the field rewards new, specific information. A focus timer app whose name already says "Focus Timer" should spend its 100 characters on "deep work", "pomodoro", "study", "concentration" — not on "focus", "timer", or "productivity app".

Building the set

Collect the words real users would type: App Store search suggestions, the vocabulary in your reviews and support email, and the terms competing listings lean on.
Deduplicate against your name and subtitle first — those 60 characters are the text users actually see, so put your strongest term there and never repeat it in keywords.
Prefer specific over broad. Apple's advice is to describe features and functionality specifically; broad single words compete with giant apps, specific phrases match intent.
Fill to the brim. An 82-character keyword string leaves 18 characters of free search surface unclaimed. Audit until you are within a few characters of 100.

The localization multiplier

The 100-character budget is per locale. Every localization you add to your App Store listing carries its own name, subtitle, and keyword field, translated for that market — which multiplies your total keyword surface by the number of locales you maintain. Apple's product-page guidance explicitly recommends tailoring the name and keywords per locale rather than copying them. Two practical notes:

A copied English keyword string in your French locale is a wasted 100 characters — localize the queries, not just the words.
Keywords ship with the version you submit for review, so plan keyword changes per release. Promotional text is the one product-page field Apple lets you update at any time without a new version — keywords are not.

Auditing keywords across every locale

The failure mode is rarely one bad field — it's drift across ten locales: a term duplicated between the en-US title and keywords, plurals in de-DE, a fr-FR string that is 40 characters short. Checking that by hand means opening every locale page in App Store Connect one at a time. Shipzen's keyword optimizer runs the audit across all locales at once: title and subtitle overlap, duplicates, same-language waste, and under-filled fields, with cleaner keyword sets you can review and apply in batch — each change staged behind a diff before anything is written to Apple. The scanner tier is free.

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